Jay Nath: Chief Innovation Officer, City of San Francisco

Jay Nath: Chief Innovation Officer, City of San Francisco

As the Mayor’s Chief Innovation Officer and White House Champion of Change, Jay Nath works with the tech community and the public to help make government more transparent, efficient, and constituent- focused. Jay applies modern, agile thinking to government administration, focusing on “lean government” as a platform for innovation. Under his leadership, the Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation launched the first of its kind Entrepreneurship in Residence program in collaboration with the White House, offering an on-premises incubator at City Hall, meant to apply startup ingenuity directly to pain points within government itself. Inspired by the Presidential Innovation Fellows, Nath created the Mayor’s Innovation Fellowship program where cross-sector leaders spend one year in City Hall working on high impact projects. He also established the nation’s first open source software policy for a city government and authored open data legislation that requires City departments to make nearly all non-confidential datasets available to the public, mandates department-level data coordinators, and creates a chief data officer position for the city. Prior to public service, Nath worked at a San Francisco startup as a senior product manager and at PricewaterhouseCoopers as a senior consultant.